Living Below the Line
CHILDREN —1 By ARTHUR BARTON
THE line is, of course, the poverty line, and it is news to many people that such a line exists at all, and a shock when they are told that over seven millions of us live below it. This is understandable, because this figure, though formidable as statistics, is spread over the whole country, and it is possible to miss seeing any of the remaining poor if you live in the right places and don't look too hard.
I have been many years in my present school, which draws from the Cheshire countryside, from the outlying suburbs of Manchester, and from a compact little industrial area centred on Britain's first canal, and I fear I have very seldom noticed that we had a quota of poorer boys.
They form in this relatively prosperous area only some 5-6 per cent of the total 500. Well camouflaged by the ubiquitous blazer and cap (bought if necessary on a secret instalment plan), decently nourished on school milk and plentiful if plain school dinners, they tend to escape the casual or harassed eye—unlike the plate-scrapers of my Lancashire school just before the war, pathetic figures who used to ask if they could clear away, their object being to eat the leavings of the less needy.
Lack of a decent haircut, a great criterion when I was at school, is obviously no guide at all today. Shoes are, to some extent, and so are socks, shirts and underwear, though these are revealed in their pathetic inadequacy 'only to PE and games instructors. Last week, however, when we staged our annual cross-country run, and all forms changed in their own rooms, the curtain was lifted a little for me.
Young Ross wore no underwear. His PE shorts and vest were in the last stages of dilapi- dation. Shoes are very oddly shaped and designed today, but his were still obviously and embarrassingly his mother's. I didn't know Ross very well. To me he was just a cheerful boy who fetches the morning milk and never spells 'Parliament' with its second 'a.' Now I've found out that he's one of five boys, and that his widowed mother cleans out city buses for a living.
My mother was a widow, but there wasn't any work for a genteel person to do on Tyneside in the 'twenties. I can feel for Ross and the rest whom I have now pretty well identified. They are worse off in some ways than we were. being a minority. By 1936 (the year of 'the march') most children in our town were inadequately clothed and underfed, and there was a certain solidarity in all being in the same miserable boat. But Ross and thousands like him are pockets of poor among the affluent. When I was poor our neighbours might have a wireless set with a loud- speaker, a plush suite, even a piano; they didn't have a Cortina and a holiday in Rumania. The major cause of poverty then was a world-wide slump, and whereas then poverty struck at the talented and untalented, the fit and the unfit, as impersonally as a plague, those who succumb today are more likely to fall into expected categories.
There must be many like young Ross—children of widows left with the burden of a large family. Others are children of the chronic sick—my father had several years of this misery—working from time to time, or perhaps not at all. Many other parents are in prison. Most of the chaps I visited a few years ago 'three-up' in Strangeways' overcrowded cells had wives and families somewhere. Probably the biggest group are like Selby, who used to sit by the window in my classroom, amiably ignoring all I had to say about King Alfred or the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He climbed out of a hole in the main road just as I was crossing it a week or two ago, and shook hands as unperturbed as ever above his sewer, while the Minis flashed by in the March sunshine.
Selby earns about ten pounds a week and has five children already at twenty-four. To some people I suppose he would be a good reason for compulsory family planning or easier abor- tion. but I can't see Selby taking much notice of either; and in any case, it's too late now. He has very limited ability, too—just about used to the full in his tiring but unexacting manual job, and he cannot expect to get pro- motion or any real increase in his standard of living. I wonder how many million Selbys there are, and what can be done about them? Perhaps in the future they will have fewer children, but in saying this I must add that I think that a man may have as many as he can satisfactorily provide for. There are signs that better sex instruction and easier practical facilities are on the way, and these will be a great help, though not, I fear, for all. There will still remain a fairly large area of almost total irresponsibility, and it is likely to remain fairly constant while the state allows the individual normal sexual freedom within marriage, which, I am glad to say, still seems likely. For these people and for the awful social messes they make there remains only charity—in its strictly Pauline sense.
There was a tendency when I was young to divide the poor into 'deserving' and 'undeserving.' I was 'deserving.' So is Ross. But I suppose Penny, in 3x, whose father is 'inside,' wouldn't have been. I am very glad to see that old partition crumbling, though I am old-fashioned enough to see some moral distinction between the inno-
cent and the guilty, the criminal and his victim But, like illegitimacy, such responsibilities havt nothing to do with a child, and it is not fen us to visit parental sins on them by our sus picion, disapproval of inevitably poor social attitudes, or even by indifference to their plight
Just what charity—the real thing, on ar awakened national scale—when and if it comes will lead to in terms of a practical and per manent solution to this last sad relic of the Industrial Revolution I cannot say, but the more of us who have our eyes opened to these gross concealed inequalities, the more who can stol feeling and being safe isolated islands, the sooner a climate in which unselfish legislation will seem right and natural can develop.
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